I bought some dry lilly bulbs from the fish department at Wall-Mart when I was getting ready to get my tanks set up. Here is the progression.


The packages from the bulbs.



The bulb at the bottom of this pic is the lilly.


The bright white is the lilly sprouts. :woo:






The bigger of the two.


It's first pad.

thats a huge pad! do you think you will ever get flowers?

The pad is only 2 1/2 inches wide and 3 1/2 inches long, the picture is just a close-up, lol. I hope I get flowers on it, that would be cool! The pad has reddish brown speckles on it.

I'm getting a second pad on the big lilly. It should unfurl over the next couple of days.

Now the smaller of the two has sent up a pad also.

The smaller lilly has sent up a red tinted pad now. It gives an interesting contrast to the green pads and the skinny green leaves of the Aponogeton floating leaves.

I love those "assorted bulb" packages....I've had more luck with them in my high pH tanks than I have with any thing else (java moss and fern included)

I've used those "assorted bulbs" several times before but this is the first time I have gotten more than one type of plant out of a package. Out of 2 packages I had 11 bulbs and got 5 plants, 2 wavy leaf, 2 "lace" leaf and the one with short, relativly speaking, narrow leaved one that also put off floating leaves and flower stalks. The lacy leaved plants have put off plantletts, the wavy leafed ones havn't made any attempt at reproducing like the other ones.
The lilly bulbs were a seperate package that was labeled "red or green lilly" and it looks like I got one of each, lol.

I had to move the smaller lilly to my other 10 gal tank, between the 2 lillys and the aponogeton plant, I only had about 4 inches of clear surface area in the tank.
now the planted 10 gal looks like a mud puddle.
I have been waiting for at least an hour for it to clear but it still looks like crap. I don't want to do the water change until it clears up a bit because I don't want to vaccume up any fry.

Boy am I glad i moved one of the lilly plants, they just took over and now the one in the sand/dirt tank has a pad that is escaping, it looks like it want's to move next door into the other 10gal.

I DO NOT reccomend using these bulbs in a small tank with good substrata!


Look at the difference in pad size, the tank on the right just has some "Betta marbles" the ones that are flat on one side, and there are not even enough of them to cover the entire floor of the tank, just enough to anchor the plant.

i personaly would move the lillies to your 50 gallon where they can spread out, what kind of tropical lillie is the one 'crossing over tanks'?

They are both from the "dwarf Lilly" package. You know, the one I got at about the same time you paid $20-somthing for your "started" lilly. :laugh:

I'm just going to leave them where they are for now, I'll be taking down all 3 tanks by probably February or March to move south and when they get set back up I'll re-configure who goes where.

yeah, it was $20.00 for 1, and, i got two, plus a $7.50 peice of water lettuce. ( i happened to get 4 for that price :whistle:

how far south are we talking? lol.

New Mexico